The Jews, that is, those opposing Jesus, had already decided he was guilty of blasphemy–but since the Romans were the temporal authority the Jews couldn’t legally execute him. (That they let the murdserer Barabbas go was cowardly and a violation of the Mosaic law to boot.)
So they told Pilate, “We found this man subverting our nation and forbidding the paying of taxes and saying that he himself is Christ a king.” Of course, this would carry weight with Pilate. But through his, and Herod’s, interrogation of Jesus, they couldn’t find any evidence. But Pilate went ahead and ordered Jesus’ execution lest the Jewish leaders report him to Caesar in Rome.
Asd for Jesus saying ‘He himself was Christ a king,’ or the Son of God, this may have made Pilate apprehensive. But years later Gasmaliel said it better, when he pointed out that if Jesus were merely a pretender, the leaders would have nothing to fear; if he was indeed the Son of God they wouldn’t be able to do anything about him. (Acts 5:37-39.)
Saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.
Report him for what? Ignoring Jewish religious law? And Ceasar would care why? No, all the Roman authorities were interested in was political troublemaking.
I don’t really buy the story of the interrogation, either. It makes no historical sense.
“No fault” when he just admitted to* treason*? This is flatly ridiculous. It says later that Herod asked him many questions, but Jesus refused to answer. That, for many, was enough to earn death, especially since Jesus was a nobody to the Romans and they didn’t particularly care if they killed a peasant.
Jesus’s own words that he was “King of the Jews” was enough to fry him. For Pilate to say (twice, no less) that he found no fault in Jesus when he had just said those dangerous words is illogical. That a man was setting himself up as a people’s king was just the sort of sedition that Pilate was charged with controlling.
Lastly, the priests would have known better than to have brought Jesus before them on simple religious grounds. What makes more sense is that they may have reported on his political rabble rousing, but the Romans had utterly no interest in enforcing Jewish religious law.
Gasmaliel must not have known much history to make a statement like that. Rebellions begin when a charismatic leader catches the people’s imagination and starts upsetting the status quo. Though Jesus’s movement was small, such things are known to grow swiftly. It was common practice to execute small-time rabble rousers.
Secondly, Jesus’s claims to be a son of God were nothing new to Pilate. Back in Rome, he was probably friends with people who claimed direct descent from gods and godesses. He would have given no more importance to Jesus’s claims.“Yeah, you and everybody else.”
Aw, crud. :smack:
Could a passing mod please fix my coding?
The answer to this depends on whether yiu take the Gospels at face value or whether you look at the extra-Biblical historical evidence for why the Romans used crucifixion in Palestine.
If you believe the Gospel accounts, Jesus was found guilty of “blasphemy” by the Sanhedrin for claiming to be the Messiah. He was then turned over to Pilate and executed, ostensibly, for claiming to be the “King of the Jews” (the crime that was written on the titulus), but really beccause Pilate felt pressured by a Jewish mob to execute him.
Many historians who have examined the Gospel accounts have not found this scenario plausible and believe that Mark created an apologetic device to shift blame away from the Romans to the Jewish temple authorities. One of the key problems with the Sanhedrin conviction is that it was not “blasphemy” to claim to be the Messiah. In fact, it was no crime at all under Jewish law and never has been.
Even if the Sanhedrin trial is accepted, though, crucifixion was purely a Roman form of execution, abhorred by Jews and actually illegal under Jewish law (which means the Sanhedrin would have been breaking their own law by calling for it).
Since this is not GD, I won’t try to argue the case for Markan fiction in the Sanhedrin trial, I’ll just state that a majority of scholars believe it to be at least partial fiction.
Moving on to why the Romans would have done it. Lissa is exactly right that Pilate would not have cared in the slightest about a Jewish religious offense, but beyond that, the Romans only used crucifixion in palestine for crimes of sedition, treason, insurgency or other crimes against the Roman state. Lissa is also right that claiming to be the Messiah, ironically, would be perceived as criminal, not for religious reasons but purely political ones. Claiming to be the Messiah was claiming to be the King of the Jews. That was a direct challenge to the authority not only of Pilate but of Caesar himself. It could easily be considered a capital crime and earn a guy a set of nails and a crossbar very quickly, especially if he had any sort of a following.
The thing is, though, they would usually try to crucify all the followers too and in Jesus’ case, they did not. It’s true that Jesus’ disciples were said to have fled back to Galilee when he was arrested and there weren’t very many of them, so maybe that’s why.
Another explanation (one proposed notably by John Dominic Crossan but supported by others) is that Jesus was executed for causing a disturbance at the Temple during Passover. Passover was a time when thousands of Jews flooded Jerusalem to sacrifice at the Temple. The Romans were greatly outnumbered while this was going on and they were extremely paranoid about riots. As a result, they were quite swift about eliminating perceived sources of trouble. Pilate is reputed to have been especially brutal.
A Galilean preacher knocking over tables in the Temple courtyard would upset people and cause a stir. would be very likely to irritate the Temple priests and would very plausibly result in a summary arrest and execution. Crossan says that Jesus was probably executed as a “public menace” in what he claims would probably strike us as a “shocking casual” manner. If his disciples scattered and disappeared among the crowds, they probably could have made it out of Jerusalem and back to Galilee fairly easily without being identified or arrested.
Of course, those who believe the Gospel stories (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that) are going to say Crossan is all wet, but I offer it as an example of how serious Historical Jesus scholars have tried to reconstruct the event.
Incidentally, the phrase “son of God” did not connote a literal divine descendant. The phrase was used commonly as an honorific for kings, or sometimes to refer to human beings in general.
Mark 14:
However, if the bolded statement was rendered in Hebrew in a way to make it appear that he was equating himself to Ha Shem, that would be blasphemy.
In is not that difficult to imagine that the phrase simply did not survive translation. (Among the few occurrences of Aramaic or Hebrew being rendered in Greek in the New Testament is the word abba, which is generally rendered as “daddy” in English, yet is translated to “father” in the Greek manuscripts. We have few examples where we have a clear rendering of what Jesus might have said in Aramaic or Hebrew as produced in the Greek Gospels.)
This does not change any of the facts that the Jews had no authority to impose the death penalty or that the Romans would not have given a flying fig regarding a violation of Jewish religious taboos. The arguments that the Gospel writers wanted to lay as much blame on the Jews as possible to avoid offending the Roman power structure continue to have merit, as well. And, of course, as depicted, the trial by the Sanhedrin violates a number of procedural protections demanded by Jewish law that would have prevented them from carrying out a death sentence in the limited space of a single overnight/early morning meeting (itself unlawful). However, it goes too far to claim that Jesus had clearly committed no act that would have encouraged the Sanhedrin to wish to impose the death penalty. There is a possibility that he had (in their eyes) blasphemed.
Mark gives no indication that Jesus has verbalized the Tetragrammaton and there’s no way his Greek audience should have been expected to to know that Ego emi could be seen as a translation of the Hebrew name of God. Moreover, blasphemy requires more than just saying the name, you have to curse the name (in Hebrew). Your suggestion that Jesus equated himself to God is not supported by the text. He said “I am the Messiah”, not “I am God.” Those are two different entities. Even if he did say Jehovah, Mark does not have him say “I AM Jehovah.” In fact, his claim to be the Messiah would have been seen as mutually contradictory to any pretensions to Godhood since one could not (in Jewish expectation and scripture) be BOTH God and the Messiah.
Beyond that, the Sanhedrin trial also contains (as you mentioned) a number of other procedural inaccuracies which throw more doubt onto its authenticity. That doesn’t mean the Temple authorities weren’t involved in some way in facilitating the arrest and handing over of Jesus, but the Temple incident itself would have been reason enough for that. The scenario in John’s Gospel, which dispenses with the trial and describes basically a short, informal interrogation before turning him over to Pilate is more plausible than Mark’s trial.
Anyway, the greater point is that if the Romans crucified Jesus, it was for their own reasons, not for any religious offense or pretensions.
No, he did not say either of those things. In response to a complex question, he responded “I am,” a statement that can be rendered in (archaic) Hebrew as the Tetragrammaton.
The on-line Jewish Encyclopedia says of Blasphemy “Evil or profane speaking of God. The essence of the crime consists in the impious purpose in using the words, and does not necessarily include the performance of any desecrating act.” A response to a claim about messiahship of sonship of God with a declaration “I am” using the very phrase that the Lord used to identify Himself to Moses would sure seem to meet that definition (and I have encountered Jewish students who have indicated that they presumed the “I am” in Mark was the spoken Tetragrammaton).
Your point that the Greek audience would not have recognized the Tetragrammaton argues for my possibility, not against it. A Gentile might have heard the rumors of the blasphemy charge and failed to understand the actual conditions under which it occurred.
Note: I am not arguing that blasphemy did play any part in the proceedings. There are too many contradictions of fact and violations of known law for the events to have occurred in the manner presented in the Gospels.
I am only pointing out that a flat statement that “a charge of blasphemy could not have played a role in the situation” is, itself, based on presumptions that are rooted in unclear evidence. We simply do not have enough solid evidence to declare that as a fact.
What was complex about the question?
This is a very simple binary question. “Christ” and “son of the Blessed” are the same thing. They both referred to the human heir to the throne of David – “the Annointed,” the Messiah. There was no inherent implication in the question about Godhood. Jesus was asked “Are you the Messiah?” and Jesus said “I am.” In pre-Christian Judaism there was no expectation or concept of Messiah as God. They were two mutually exclusive entities (and still are in Jewish theology). Even if Jesus was claiming to both at the same time, it’s not a claim which would have been immediately sensible to the Sanhedrin. They would have seen an affirmative answer to question of Messiahship as being a de facto claim NOT to be God.
I didn’t actually declare it as fact that Jesus couldn’t have said something the Sanhedrin would have found blasphemous. I said that it’s one of the reasons a lot of scholars don’t believe Mark’s conviction-- as he tells it – to be authentic. It IS a fact that claiming to be the Messiah was not (and is not) blasphemy under Jewish law, and it is a fact that Jesus said nothing in Mark’s Greek text which constitutes prima facie blasphemy. Mark gives no explicit indication that Jesus spoke the words “I am” in Hebrew, an affirmative answer to being asked if he was the Messiah is by definition a denial of Godhood (as the Sanhedrin would have understood the answer) and the other procedural implausibilities in mark’s trial all point to a fictionalized account of the event (something, which as I said above, was much more likely to be in accord with John’s description of a brief detainment and interrogation rather than a formal trial and conviction). I think that the hypothesis that Jesus verbalized the Tetragrammaton when asked if he was the Messiah is slightly tendentious, that it needs not be posited except as a means to salvage some possible historicity in an account that is already implausible for other reasons and that it’s more parsimonious simply to assume that Mark had a mistaken understanding of Jewish theology vis-a-vis the Messiah (he made other mistakes, after all).
Having said all that, it of course can’t be proven to a dead certainty that the Sanhedrin didn’t think Jesus had blasphemed himself but I think it would require better evidence to show that than what we have in Mark, and – getting back to the OP’s actual question – it still would not have been the reason that Jesus was crucified by the Romans.
On the other hand, it provides a plausible explanation for the claim that Jesus was accused of blasphemy. If the Jews would not have considered any statement by Jesus blasphemous and the Gentiles would not have considered any statement by Jesus blasphemous, you are stuck with Mark inserting a charge into the account that is not based on any oral tradition prior to his writing. A Gentile getting wrong the facts of Jewish jurisprudence does not preclude the possibility of getting the rumors surrounding the event correct.
There is nothing tendentious in noting a plausible explanation for a statement, particularly when it is offered only as an explanation without any insistence that it must be true.
This doesn’t make any sense. After all, if they had no right to execute anyone, what was the deal with the woman about to be stoned and Jesus putting a halt to it? Sounds like that was going to be an execution. What happened between then and when they decided to nail The Big Guy Jr. to the tree? Did John Cleese not have a replacement trained or something?
The woman caught in adultery was going to be a lynching (just as the killing of Stephen was a lynching and not a legal matter). The people bringing the woman to Jesus may not even have had any intention of killing her–they were just looking for a way to get Jesus to repudiate the Law and diminish himself in front of the crowd. He simply outwitted them in his response.
I can’t be the only one thinking this:
Stop it! Now, look! No one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle! Do you understand?! Even, and I want to make this absolutely clear, even if they do say ‘Jehovah’.
The adulterous woman story was probably not part of the orginal Gospel of John. From Biblegatewy
I don’t think it’s the most plausible explanation. There actually isn’t any evidence for any oral tradition of a blasphemy conviction before Mark (as meager as the pre-Markan evidence is, there is still some – namely the Pauline corpus and perhaps Q) and I think Mark himself gives some evidence as to why he would prefer a blasphemy conviction to an alternative that he may not have found palatable.
The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. 56Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. From Mark 14:55-57:
57Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: 58"We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.’ " 59Yet even then their testimony did not agree.
If Jesus had announced any kind of symbolic statement or intent regarding the destruction of the Temple (or perhaps even not so symbolic. I think it was Bart Ehrman who proposed that Jesus was literally trying to bring about the apocalypse by initiating an assault on the Temple, but Ehrman has a much more apocalyptic view of Jesus than I do), then Mark would have had a reason to gloss those acusations as lies or confused testimony and settle instead on a question of Jesus’ identity. The Gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying, “I will destroy this Temple and nobody will be able to rebuild it.” Crossan proposes that something like this was likely the core saying (and that the “three days” part was added later) and that this kind of statement was at the root of Jesus’ arrest and execution. The fact that a similar statement about the destruction of the Temple is independently attested in Thomas (without apology or qualification) suggests that it was already in oral tradition and that maybe Mark felt the need address it and “correct” it to something less problematic.
I goofed. I misspelled the scholar’s name: it should have been Gamaliel. :o
In any case, the point he made is quite valid: If the religion Jesus of Nazareth started was just something some man thought up, it would come to naught; but if it were authorized by God Amighty there was nothing the opponents living at Paul’s time could do about it. And neither can you, Diogenes.
It’s a nice soundbite, but there are, in fact, a number of very old and very different religions in the world. Either they’re all sanctioned by God, or at least some of them were human in origin.
And even if all movements started by men are doomed to fade away in time, that doesn’t mean they won’t cause a lot of headaches for the government in the meanwhile. I mean, we don’t see many Branch Davidians around any more, but that doesn’t mean that that little incident in Waco didn’t matter to the feds.
So I guess that Scientology must be true then, huh?
For the record, I’ve never in my life said that Christianity is something “some man thought up.” I think it was a hell of a lot more complex than that.
Don’t turn to me for support of Scientology. I happen to know that Scientologists criticize psychiatry, for one thing. I have considerable respect for the psychiatric profession and its practitioners; without them I might be dead or institutionalized today. In fact, Hubbard fabricated some kind of “psychopolitics” quote by KGB head Lavrenti Beria and “snuck” it into the Library of Congress. (Bent Croydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, 1982; quoted in They Never Said It by Boller & George, 1989.)